R D Laing argued that individuals can inherit the deficits of their cultural background as personal psychology. These deficits then manifest as emotional problems.

I relate to this. I especially hate my social inheritance and the historical setting I came from. It was an environment of poorly educated, under-developed types whose lack of self-awareness was such that they were unable to stem their inherited psychological ills. These deficits have proved with each generation increasingly difficult to break down.

It seems churlish to be contemptuous of your origins. It is morally treasonable as you are supposed to be valiantly and endlessly loyal to your background. I think that is gross stupidity. A necessity perhaps for some but not at all clever because of the tendency to bury the indiscretions and messed-up emotional baggage of your upbringing.

Also there is a silly bias in favour of assuming that those who have been historically oppressed - working people, the rank and file, the proletariat in Marxist terms - are somehow morally elevated because of their subjugation. This is a nonsense too. The bad things that have happened to you are no direct measure of moral fortitude. This applies to individuals as well as to communities. A community earns it kudos from what it does and not from what has been visited upon it.

The working classes of the past, faced with little alternative, were materialistic and self-interested. They got their hands dirty, first in the fields, then in industrial society, with no choice. Many were slaughtered on battlefields engaged in fights not of their own making. Very few could make alternative lives and lift themselves from the shackles. Progress came from the broader social and economic conditions. Few distinguished themselves. My town for example has almost no celebrated sons or daughters. It has working jobbers, intellectual retards with lazy minds and no creativity, people who hide behind a work ethic and think because they and their fore-fathers traded their labour endlessly then that was sufficient to quality for rectitude. It wasn't. Hard work of itself does little beyond providing material subsistence. For hard work to have high value it needs to be cultivated in a proper context of social progress, moral elevation and some kind of advancement toward emancipation of the human condition.

The working communities didn't do much to this end. They mainly served to sustain many of the negative aspects of humanity. This is why I resent the environment in which I was brought up and the people who inhabited it. In Laing's terms I have inherited the psychological ills of my culture. It is that before anything else that leads to the scorn I have for my people and more importantly for that dreaded propensity to the low esteem and self-loathing which has blighted my life.